Okay, I’ve asked in the past about whether or not you guys carry a credit card balance, but I’ve never really touched on the issue of actual debt load. So in this Money Poll, I’d like to ask about your current debt load. Before we get started, here are a few ground rules…

First of all, please don’t include your current credit card balance if you pay it off in full every month. Also, without getting into a debate about ‘good’ debt vs. ‘bad’ debt, I’d like to ask that you exclude: (1) your primary mortgage, and (2) credit card debt resulting from a 0% credit card offer that you took advantage of such that you could bank the proceeds and earn interest. Aside from that, if you owe money for something you should include it.

Of course, if you’d like to include additional information, you’re always welcome to provide a breakdown in the comments. And if your debt isn’t so bad (maybe you don’t even have any), but you had a whopper of a debt sometime in the past, please share that in the comments, as well… Your success story could be just the thing that someone needs to get them through a tough time.

With that said, here we go…

{democracy:24}

Note: If the poll doesn’t work properly in the RSS feed you’ll have to click through. Sorry.

About the author:Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!

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Comments (scroll down to add your own):

Minus my student loans, we currently carry approximately $53,000 worth of debt. We started on our journey to aggresively pay it down in November, with a goal of paying it down by January 2009. Thus far, we’ve put almost $5k towards our goal.

Our only debt is on a home credit line, on which we only have home improvement expenses. In a way, I consider that essentially part of the primary mortgage, as in theory that expense can be recovered in a sale.

But, for consistancy, I answered the poll to include that line of credit, as it is not technically a primary mortgage.

If you discount the line of credit as well as the primary mortgage, we have 0, and have for mmmm, 13 years.

Right now, we have about $80,000 in non-home debt. That’s 2 cars, 2 student loans and 1 credit card. We have excellent credit scores and history, but we just bought a little too much. I’ve been chronicling our rise from the debt demon at my site.

I plan to pay off our 1 car ($15,000) by September of this year, then move onto either my student loans or my Ridgeline. My wife wants me to pay off the credit cards, but we have 0% interest on them. It’s more of the idea of having credit card debt bothers her.

Yes, life does indeed suck right now, but I’m working on it. Upside: no credit card debt, and I do have an emergency reserve so I’ll likely never have this much debt ever again. My current plan has this all gone in 5 years.

I just bought a house, so I have a lot of mortgage debt. But it won’t last.

Outside of mortgage debt, we only have student loan debt. Right now, that’s less than $20,000, but it will be climbing quite a bit. The wife starts her second semester of law school tomorrow, and I’ve only paid about half of my student loan debt off over the past 4 years.

Car loan was just paid off in December and I received the title on Saturday. It was a 7 yr loan, I paid off in 3 yrs almost to the day. That was a relief. I’m going to drive this car until my kids go to college, that’s 14 yrs from now. 🙂

Wow. Exclude the mortgage and instantly go from “Over $50,000” to “Zero”. 🙂

Of course, my _business_ has about $80K worth of debt on paper, but that’s a bit of a complicated situation (the debt exists primarily to help shelter business income from US taxes)…plus it’s not personal debt, so I don’t include it.

But the only debt my fiancee and I have that requires periodic payments is the mortgage. It’s a doozy of one, at the moment, but it’s categorically excluded from the poll. 🙂

We have enough to pay it off now, but we figure we’re earning off the money and they are getting $0 off us. It’ll be paid off in roughly a year from now, early enough that we won’t incur any fees or increased interest.

Have around $13,000 in an auto loan, which I purchased for about $27,000 last July. Will have it paid off by June of this year. No CC debt, pay it off every month. So although I’m in the 10-20,000 category, it’s not as bad as it seems.

I have $334,442 in “bad debt”. That does not include my 40K plus of student loans. Needless to say, I’m in quite the pickle at the moment. About 100K of that is business loans, but unsecured and personally guarenteed by me. Another 50K is in credit cards. I am about 60K upside down in my mortgage on my house. The remainder of the debt is owed to family members, luckily at 0% interest, but still bad debt none the less. I’m probably not going to make it, but I have to try. So far, nothing has gone to collections yet, but I am starting to get behind.

Ick – I’m in the second largest group, 10001 to 20000. We have about 13.5K in credit card debt. Can’t even tell you what we bought. 🙁 The rest of our debt is our house, but we have mucho equity, so if all else fails, we can sell I ‘spose. Trying to get dh on board to help me figure out how to stop the cycle, but no luck so far! I’m studying many finance blogs to fortify my very non-mathmatical brain (and why am I the one who handles the finances?!). Gee, I wonder why we’re in debt!?

$40,000 home improvement loan at 7.7%. Nothing else, and we are on track to pay it off in 2 years (so about $43,200 if counting total interest). After paying off our old debts (credit cards & auto) we made sure to first fully fund our emergency savings (including payments for this loan) as well as our 401k and Roth IRA’s (we’re too old to wait any longer on these!)- plus prove to ourselves we could go an entire year without recharging up our cc’s. One of the great reliefs about being credit card debt free is having the money to fund much needed home repairs and knowing we now have the ability, know-how, and discipline to pay it off. Meanwhile we are hoping that the energy savings from new windows, new central air, etc., will offset the interest expense. Just a few short years ago I would never in my wildest dream have imagined being able to come up with $40,000+ in just 2 years! *Claire, we used to be just as clueless as you, and as stubborn as your husband. Keep reading and studying, and applying what you learn. We changed our lives around and I know you can too!

Around 70k combined in student loan debt for my husband and I – since we’re internationals, no interest-free loans from our home country for us!

Plus ~$4500 in consumer debt. In the last 6 months we’ve paid off ~$12,500 of consumer debt (wedding plus moving to another country), and were about to pay off the last $4500, until “real life” hit us with several really hard bangs! Looking forward to getting back on track though, once I get a new job and we move to our next country.

We can officially break even … no credit card debt … no car loans but a 12 year old minivan and a 6 year old car. By pulling a little more than 1/2 of my husband’s IRA … we may pay off our house by the end of the year and just take the hit on taxes… figuring that taxes are the lowest now that they will ever be in our lifetimes. (The U.S. government looks like it is heading towards bankrupcy unless more responsible people are elected in 2010?)

I am not sure if we have done the right thing. We’re close to debt free but without savings, retirement, and with super old cars and old hand me down furniture.

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